A mobile (cellular) telephone for a telecommunications system like GSM, UMTS, D-AMPS or CDMA2000 is a common example of a mobile terminal according to the above. For many years, the conventional user interface of mobile telephones was limited to a display, a keypad, a speaker and a microphone. The mobile terminals of those times were predominantly used for speech communication (telephone calls), and therefore a simple, character-based user interface involving a small, monochrome display and a keypad sufficed. In recent times, mobile terminals have been provided with various features and services in addition to speech communication. Such features and services include, for instance, contacts/-phonebook, calendar, electronic messaging, video games, still image capture, video recording, audio (music) playback, etc. This expansion or broadening of the usability of mobile terminals has led to more sophisticated graphical user interfaces, typically involving a larger, high-resolution color display and a multi-way input device such as a joystick or a 4/5-way navigation key.
As the mobile terminals become more and more advanced, it is generally desired to present more and more information on the display. However, this is in conflict with strong market demands for miniaturized mobile terminals; a small overall apparatus size of the mobile terminals also restricts the size of the display. Therefore, available display area on the display screen of the display has been a limited resource and is expected to remain so also in the future.
Whenever several objects are to be presented simultaneously on the display screen, it is believed to be an advantage if such presentation can be made in a compact manner (allowing presentation of many objects at the same time) with as good as possible legibility of the individual objects.
This is particularly relevant when the digital objects are digital images. It is observed that many if not all new mobile terminals currently sold are equipped with an image browser and a digital camera. The user of such a mobile terminal typically stores and manages his captured images in a hierarchical file structure stored internally in the memory of the mobile terminal, or even in a more advanced image database. Some models of mobile terminals moreover allow the user to access, and even download, images provided at a remote server, etc, over the mobile telecommunications network or another data network associated therewith, such as the Internet. It is foreseen that such image browsing capability will continue to be an important factor for market success for mobile terminals in the future.
The image browser in current mobile terminals typically presents a compact representation of the available images, e.g. the images stored at a particular current level in the hierarchical file structure or image database, in an ordered manner on the display screen. The compact representation may typically be either the file names/image names of the images, or a thumbnail version of each image. As is well known in this technical field, a thumbnail version of an image is a small-sized, quality-reduced version of the original image. Often, a thumbnail is not completely legible, but it nevertheless gives the user a sense of the overall nature of the image—e.g. image hue, image style, etc. The ordered manner in which such thumbnails are presented on the display screen typically follows either a linear row or a grid structure. In the latter case, the thumbnails are shown in n rows, each row containing m thumbnails, therefore allowing simultaneous presentation of n×m thumbnails on the display screen. If the file names/image names are shown instead of the thumbnails, they are typically presented in a list on the display screen.
WO 2004/023283 discloses a graphical user interface system for a device such as an interactive television set-up box, a hand-held computer or a mobile terminal. A scrollable menu of selectable menu options are shown on the display screen in the form of a series of panels, or icons, along an essentially semi-circular path. Each panel or icon represents a respective selectable menu option. The user can scroll between different panels by pressing left and right arrow keys. In response to this, a cursor which focuses on a currently “highlighted” panel is shifted accordingly. When the cursor has been shifted a certain number of positions in one of the scrolling directions, the entire series of panels are shifted in the opposite direction, so that the focused panel is repositioned at a centered location at the bottom of the semi-circular path. A focused panel is selected, or, more precisely, the menu option represented by that panel is selected, by pressing a dedicated selection key such as Enter. In one embodiment, the menu is hierarchical, i.e. each panel on the uppermost (root) level represents a folder which in itself may contain subfolders and/or selectable panels on a lower level. The user moves between different levels in this hierarchical menu by way of up and down arrow keys. All panels (provided that they fit within the available display area) are shown for the current level in the menu system, and furthermore the parent panel (but only that) of a currently focused panel is shown.
An advantage of providing the digital objects, i.e. the selectable panels, along a curved path rather than in a one or two dimensional linear structure is that it allows a larger number of objects to fit withing the available area on the display screen. Moreover, it is believed to be a representation which is intuitive and user-friendly. However, WO 2004/023283 has a number of shortcomings.
Firstly, the solution proposed in WO 2004/02.3283 is not particularly suitable for a digital object browser, since apart from the limited-sized panels themselves, it does not provide any clear information about the particulars of each available digital object. In addition, the solution proposed in WO 2004/023283 lacks an expedient way of presenting, for convenient selection by the user, operations that are available for each digital object when it is focused.
Secondly, the present inventors have realized that the solution proposed in WO 2004/023283 does not make optimal use of the available display area.
Furthermore, the information provided as regards a focused object's whereabouts, relative to the hierarchical or otherwise ordered structure in which it is stored, is indicated only in a very limited way (immediately preceding level only, parent object only).
Similar, but simpler, graphical user interfaces with menu option icons along a curved path are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,411,307 and WO 02/39712.